Chapter Text
Ron and Hermione were married, now. It was a beautiful, happy wedding, during the muddy beginning of spring, a day of flowers and big emotions and promises fulfilled. It did not shunt them back into any kind of normalcy, but it felt good, and it felt final. There were painful moments, as there were every day, but there were enough joyous ones as well to more than balance them out.
One perk of being an adult fundamentally broken by their adolescence was that everyday anxieties seemed trivial compared to the fears living in your own brain. The mundane stress of wedding planning only became unbearable when it toed the line of tragedies past.
Hermione reallocated most of the traditional planning to more willing participants—Molly Weasley and Fleur—and herself took on the mission of inviting, along with close family and friends, every surviving member of their year at Hogwarts. In terms of sheer number, this was not a daunting task: their year was by this point only around twenty-five strong, and most of those were easily tracked down and readily accepted the invitation. Thus the wedding was a bustling affair, and many a reunion was had between friends and acquaintances from long ago, fallen out of touch or separated by circumstance.
Hermione's dress was stunning, and to any degree that it might have been uncharacteristically ruffled and bejeweled and impractical, no one—herself included—seemed to mind, and Fleur was for her part very pleased with the work she'd done choosing and procuring it. Harry's speech as best man brought the whole congregation to tears, and Molly's cooking at the reception left all warm and full. Once the decorations had all been packed away and the guests returned to their various homes by floo, broom, portkey, and apparation, the various Weasleys and Honorary Weasleys were left deciding what was to be done next.
The coming work week saw most of them returning to their jobs, but Harry remained restless and distracted. Auror work was by no means easy, but there was not insignificant downtime, and Harry found he'd quite forgotten how to manage himself during those times.
He and Ginny had long since terminated any romance between them, but they shared a flat, which was convenient but not entirely for convenience's sake. Harry enjoyed sharing a home with one of his closest friends, regardless of their history, and it allowed them to avoid the public response to a "breakup". It was no surprise that Ginny was one of the first to notice Harry's mood; he was coming home from work frustrated and wound up day after day, and Ginny took note of it immediately.
"It's worse than usual, though," Ginny whined to Hermione, who she'd cornered in the kitchen near the tail end of a Weasley family dinner. "I love that stupid man, but you're well aware of just how many extra rules are required to make cohabiting with him anything less than unbearable. He left his socks on the kitchen counter yesterday, and this morning he woke me up at arse-o-clock to help him find his glasses, which were on his head."
Hermione grunted appeasingly, staring hard at a list scratched in one of her notebooks. She summoned a quill and scribbled out an entry.
"I mean, I know what I signed up for, and I know it's hard for all of us, but I really think maybe there's something he needs that could save me some trouble." Ginny knocked her elbow into Hermione's. "So…"
Hermione was silent, and Ginny turned to see her counting something in her head, chewing on the end of her quill.
"Come on, 'Mione! You're the smart one, help a girl out." Ginny leaned over to peek at the notebook. "What are you doing, anyway?"
Hermione sat back, rubbing her eyes. "Sorry, Ginny. I'm…" She flicked the notebook shut. "Just working on finishing a project, making sure the other people from our year who didn't RSVP are accounted for in one way or another. Sorry again, you were saying?"
"That's a good idea, huh," Ginny said, trying to snatch the notebook, but Hermione got there first and pulled it out of reach. "Yeah, I was saying that Harry's acting strange, but when isn't he?" she said dismissively, obviously done being concerned over it. "So why's this RSVP thing taking so long? You already got married and everything."
"And everything, indeed," Hermione said, rolling her eyes. "Harry gets like that when he's bored, because then his brain just starts filling every empty space with more directionless think - think - think ing. He needs more things in real life to focus on—a big project, or some overtime hours." She scraped a piece of loose hair behind her ear tiredly. "And my project is taking longer because some of these non-guests are incredibly hard to track down. Parkinson—Pansy Parkinson—seemed to have disappeared off the map completely; I found out just a couple days ago that she's currently living in muggle Italy, and has gone no-contact with most everyone here, including her family."
This made a lot of sense, now that Ginny thought of it. Pansy would skip town like that, and many more would make themselves difficult to find in other ways. "How many people are you still looking for?"
"Oh, just a few. Fay Dunbar, but she's a traveler, so I'm sure I'll find her eventually. Zabini is elusive, but that's normal for him… and Malfoy."
"Draco?" Ginny's expression got caught between disdain and surprised confusion.
What happened with Draco after the end of the war was common knowledge, at least to his friends and classmates. He and his parents were tried for their allegiance and their crimes shortly after Voldemort's death, and Narcissa and Draco both were given opportunity to testify against Lucius. Narcissa served a short sentence, and Draco did a stint of house arrest. Upon her release, Narcissa "sold" Malfoy Manor to her son, and moved into the smaller Malfoy summer home in the south of France, where she proceeded to move on with her life as though neither the war nor her family had ever existed. Upon his release, Draco continued to live in the manor just as though he were confined there, as far as anyone had been able to tell. He took on a small Ministry of Magic position—quite small indeed, as he was and would remain far from trusted—worked almost entirely from home, and seemed content despite a suspicious lack of promotion.
"I asked his boss at the Ministry, and was told he's taken a month of stocked-up sick leave and no one's heard from him since," Hermione said, looking frustrated.
Ginny blew a raspberry. "He's probably sick, then."
"He could be," Hermione acquiesced. "Doesn't explain why he hasn't answered any letters or calls, even from his friends, and hasn't told anyone how he's sick. If it were serious enough to keep him bedridden for so long, surely a healer would have been notified…"
"Maybe," she replied. "Maybe he's staying somewhere else."
"I suppose…" Hermione rubbed her chin, looking troubled. "It just feels wrong to leave this unfinished. But it can wait—we were trying to help Harry, yes?"
"Harry's fine, this is more interesting." Hermione frowned, and Ginny looked sheepish. "Sorry, sorry, you know the two of us share our impatience. And we love a good mystery."
"Indeed," Hermione agreed. "We could… well, now that I think of it… Ginny, do you remember sixth year? Our sixth, your fifth, when Harry would follow Draco around all day like a kid playing make-believe as a super spy, convinced he was up to something nefarious?"
" Do I."
"I mean, he turned out to be right, of course, but we were all convinced he'd gone mental."
" Hadn't he."
"Yes, yes, our lovely Potter is of questionable soundness of mind. The point is, would you rather be rooming with restless Harry or stalker Harry?"
Ginny cocked her head. "I see where you're going with this and, all things considered, stalker Harry sounds like the lesser evil."
"That sounds right. I can try to make him think finding Draco is his own idea, just to give the whole thing a little more longevity. Thank you for bringing me your concerns."
"No, thank you ," Ginny said, holding out a hand like they were making a business deal.
They shook.
— — —
The last time Harry had been to Malfoy Manor had been under less than ideal circumstances. Now, as he stood before it, he racked his brain for the memory as a point of comparison. With what little he remembered about the house itself, it looked the same as it had years ago—opulent, imposing, and decidedly overkill.
Malfoy Manor's sculpted metal gates were locked and warded, but since he knew he wasn't going to be let in, Harry didn't bother trying to get through by any polite means. He cast an accidentally-a-bit-too-powerful Alohomora at the area of the lock, which opened immediately with a sound like something breaking, and as he crossed the Malfoy property line Harry held a generic shield spell tightly over his whole body in case any other wards were triggered. Remarkably, nothing seemed to happen.
The doors to the manor itself opened under Harry's hands, and made a dry creaking sound as they opened across the marble floor of the entryway. Despite how carefully Harry had learned to place his feet, he felt uncomfortably loud as he moved through the smooth, cold darkness. A small, glowing ward, set into the inside wall above the doorway, throbbed with pinkish light. Harry recognized it as an alarm ward, likely with similar lights going off in most rooms of the manor, but no one seemed to be there to see it.
Harry navigated by the shallow evening light leaking in through lead-paned windows set high up in the walls, muffling his footsteps as best he could. After several minutes of delicate searching turned up no signs of life, he turned a trepidatious gaze to the stairs.
The basement of Malfoy Manor was more familiar territory to him, but that didn't mean he'd like to go there. A long moment of consideration later, he decided to risk a simple tracking spell.
It was a moot point, as his wand cheerfully notified him that Draco (or whatever singular living thing the spell may have located) was downstairs anyway. As the basement was without windows, he navigated mostly by touch, less worried now about keeping quiet (and more prone to bumping into things). He passed high, carved stone doors, closed and locked tightly, narrow hallways lined with paintings and artifacts, rickety spiral stairs leading up or down to otherwise unreachable areas of the sprawling manor.
He knew he was close to finding Draco when he finally began to hear a noise—a faint, inconsistent crackling, like television static. And closer still, when he saw the faintest blue-white glow begin to skim the floor tiles. Harry dismissed the spell entirely at one point and began to follow the light, which led him through several unlocked wooden doors, up a short flight of stairs, and into the only room in the house with the light turned on.
It appeared to be a potions lab that Harry was walking into, outfitted with burners, a walk-in pantry, and every size, shape, and material of container that money could buy. No potions were in progress, but there were some materials left out, as though something had been brewed and then carried away without clean-up.
Away from the lab area it slowly melted into something resembling a library or study, a single small bookshelf with a shabby wooden desk tucked in next to it, and pushed back a few feet from the desk, was a worn upholstered chair.
The room had a sense of being separate from the rest of the manor, and Harry speculated Draco had redone and furnished it since his parents had left. It had a feeling of life and warmth that everywhere else in the manor lacked sorely.
And it was empty.